Sinfonietta

Trumpet Quintet

Five trumpets in a multi-storey fire escape

Program note:

Brass practice rooms at the Elder Conservatorium of Music (Adelaide) are located in the university’s 12-storey Schulz Building, which may look fairly ugly on the outside, but is home to a wonderfully reverberant set of fire stairs. There is an obvious attraction of such an acoustic to brass players, and after much enjoyable experimentation (to the bemusement of everyone else in the building), this Sinfonietta was composed. It was premiered in 2008 to an audience gathered on various levels of the Schulz stairwell.

The piece is slightly ‘weird’ by necessity – situated on five different landings, the trumpet players could not see each other, or a conductor, and so I had to find alternative (and less strict) means of synchronization.

Following a preludial march, the work is in four movements, all making use of the spatial arrangement of the musicians. There are several unusual effects (like breath and mouthpiece sounds) and in many places the trumpeters are free to play ‘whenever’ they like. This ‘organised chaos’ reaches a kind of resolution in the final movement, before the trumpet players gather together once more and march out the way they entered.

This piece works best in a very reverberant acoustic, but does not have to be performed in a stairwell! It has also been successfully performed in a church, utilizing the full space (ie, both in front of the audience and behind them).